I’m the VP of Marketing at AnyRoad, a software company that empowers brands to develop high impact experiential programs.

How big is it?

Our growing marketing team consists of six people in demand generation (2), product marketing (3) and corporate marketing (1). We expect to double in size over the next six months.

Where are your teammates located?

Today approximately 50% of our team is remote but we do have offices in San Francisco, CA Portland, OR and Athens, Greece. The marketing team is based in California and Greece.

What does your team do? What are you responsible for?

My team is focused on growing our business through brand building, pipeline generation and enablement. The main KPI for marketing is the volume of opportunities and pipeline we source.

It's important to have a clear understanding of goals and priorities for a remote team to work well together. This ensures we are all pulling in the same direction. I like using the OKR framework for this and we’ll soon begin the process of establishing our OKRs for 2022.

In addition to goals, the team needs to have the right technologies and processes to facilitate remote work. Personally, I would struggle to stay connected and to collaborate with my colleagues without Google Docs, Zoom and Slack. More recently we’ve started using Monday.com to track complex projects. These are the indispensable tools that allow us to operate remotely.

Communication is really important. Weekly team meetings, regular standups and 1-1s helps maintain dialogue across the team. 

I also like to ensure the team has line of sight on the impact they have at the company. This is particularly important for startups where individual effort can make a massive difference on company performance. To do this I like the OKR model which allows us to ladder individual goals up to a corporate level and maintain alignment across teams. 

To encourage a culture of innovation and experimentation, I also like to ‘celebrate failure’, especially when the failure is in a controlled experiment and we can learn from it. This helps create psychological safety for the team and maintain momentum.

The pandemic has created challenges for us to make personal connections at work - productivity is up but collaboration is down at most companies. I think it's important to spend time in person for both operational planning and team development. This will be a priority in 2022.

As a company we do two all-hands meetings a week. One is required and is focused on updating on company news and priorities while the other is optional and is focused on building connections between colleagues. We’ve held a number of virtual happy hours and events and more recently in-person is starting to become more common.

I’m lucky to have a leader on the team who actively brings a sense of fun to our remote work. She’s led a number of initiatives such as Fantasy Football and wine tasting to bring the team together. Fantasy Football is very popular and it's often the least football savvy folks that win. We need to balance fun and work more, especially while remote.

I use icebreakers for team offsites and workshops mostly. My favorite is to have the group share their Uber / Lyft rider rating with one another and discuss what factors might contribute to their score. Lots of fun anecdotes shared.

Today we are using Lattice for managing growth conversations and collecting feedback. While not designed specifically for culture or morale it helps put in place structures for us to build on. More recently we hired a VP of people who will help us invest in more people and culture initiatives.  

From a tooling perspective, I like to use Myers Briggs or True Colors to assess team personalities and working styles. This helps build empathy and diversity.

Learning never stops and this is especially true for those who are management. I read a lot and am a big fan of Patrick Lencioni’s writing and research on management. I also try to read Harvard Business Review as they have short snackable content that provides practical tips for managers. I follow Barry O’Reilly for his perspectives on productivity and Arianna Huffington for her take on mental health.